With less than a month to go, and the deadline for submitting presentation proposals approaching this week (15 July), Andrew Shitov has made several exciting announcements about the first ever Raku Conference (online on 7 August):

• Accepted “105 C++ Algorithms in 1 line* of Raku (*each)” by Daniel Sockwell.
• Accepted “Update on Raku Persistent Data Structures” by Daniel Sockwell.
• Accepted “Making of Raku Developer” by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Accepted “Basics of templating with Cro::WebApp” by Oleksandr Kyriukhin.
• Accepted “Parallelized and Concurrent testing with Test::Async” by Vadim Belman.
• Accepted a 4-hour class “Learning Raku From Inside Out” by Vadim Belman.
• There are now more presentations than can fit on a single day track.
• Edument has become the Gold Sponsor, thank you and all the other sponsors!
• Now 100 attendees registered!

Which brings the question: should the conference be stretched to 2 days with a single track? Or should it stay a single day with 2 simultaneous tracks? Please leave your views with “Thinking of time” or let Andrew Shitov know by other means.

Array Cast Podcast

Daniel Sockwell is a listener to the Array Cast Podcast and decided to send in an email about why they had stopped using APL in favor of the Raku Programming Language. This resulted in an entire episode (transcript, /r/apljk, /r/rakulang) dedicated to Daniel‘s mail! This also spawned threads on /r/apljk and /r/rakulang. Cool! And cool marketing outside of the bubble!

Getting to highlight Raku code

Siavash Askari Nasr describes their journey getting their Raku website to properly highlight Raku code in examples in Raku, Go, Chroma, Germanium, Hugo and my blog. Cool to see so much tricky Raku code highlighted correctly (/r/rakulang comments)! See also their qutebrowser userscripts!

Malware Analysis

Paula blogs about how they used YARA for simple malware analysis before, but have now changed to using the Raku Programming Language for malware analysis (/r/rakulang comments).

Creating awesome Pull Requests

JJ Merelo has written a very nice blog posts on how you can create awesome Pull Requests: useful, insightful, educational, teamwork. That applies to both the blog post and what your PR’s should be (/r/rakulang comments)!

Flavio’s Corner

Flavio Poletti continued writing, with 3 posts this week!

• Graph visit algorithms in cglib-raku
• Floyd-Warshall algorithm implementations
• Raku cglib – a basic priority queue

Wenzel’s Corner

Two blog posts by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer this week:

• The next fast thing (/r/rakulang comments)
• Contextual addition (Pull Request)

Joining the Raku Steering Council

The Raku Steering Council has announced that Geoffrey Broadwell will fill the open seat in the Raku Steering Council. Geoffrey has been involved in Raku from its very beginning in 2000, so this is an excellent addition to the RSC and good news for the Raku community!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #121 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.28)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Add a test ensuring a Hash iterator misuse is not exploding
• Add a new doc with guidance for adding new features
• Add two tests for proper error messages
• Extend binary release pipeline to also create an MSI installer
• Add Associative HyperWhatever support
• Allow openbsd to locate shared libraries by version

Please check these Pull Requests and leave any comments that you may have!

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert fixed a memory corruption issue with spesh stats being freed when they shouldn’t be, and a garbage collection issue when (de-)serializing bytecode.
• Tom Browder simplified some pre-processor code on MoarVM.
• Samantha McVey fixed an issue in the ShiftJIS decoder.
• Nguyễn Gia Phong added some mkdir related tests.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed some cases where next slip(42,666) (and last) were not handled correctly, and performed some optimizations on the iterators used by map and for loops.
• And some other smaller fixes and optimizations.

Meanwhile, on the new-disp branch, Jonathan Worthington managed to get Rakudo to build with the new dispatch mechanism being used by default. This is an immense step forward! Next step is to make all the currently broken tests pass.

Questions about Raku

• Concise (one line?) binary search by Daniel Sockwell.
• Refactoring a recursive function into iterative in a coin-change type of problem by Lars Malmsteen.
• What is the intended value of &?ROUTINE? by Daniel Sockwell.
• Best way to write a grammar with operator precedence and associativity? by zeekar.
• Would you consider Raku to be an array language? (/r/apljk) by theangryepicbanana.
• Would you consider Raku to be an array language? (/r/rakulang) by Daniel Sockwell.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• #120.1 in a Tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Programming the Japanese Way by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• #120.2 in a Tweet by Markus Holzer.
• qutebrowser scripts by Siavash.
• No sysadmin book by Sean Kenji Gold.
• My goal next month by Sean Kenji Gold.
• Rewarding! by Sean Kenji Gold.
• Did not exist by magnoliak.
• 105 C++ Algorithms in 1 line by The Raku Conference.
• What you have to call it by Murata Yuichi.
• Finished draft notes by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Submitted “Making of a Raku Developer” by Mohammad S Anwar.
• 7.75 hours by The Raku Conference.
• Be an LDAP, love by Jonathan Stowe.
• Helping with capacity planning by The Raku Conference.
• Game Entities to come to Raku by JJ Atria.
• New logo, please! by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Run out of a single track! by The Raku Conference.
• Reflected long and hard by Not Jack.
• Gold Sponsor! by The Raku Conference.
• 100 attendees! by The Raku Conference.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• How do a pre-salt an array inside an object? by ToddAndMargo.
• use lib and locations in a variable by Joseph Brenner.
• Windows tutorial needed (Todd?) by Tom Browder.

Comments about Raku

• Standard libraries of Raku by Ralph Mellor.
• Traits for building objects by Ralph Mellor.
• Similar syntax for list comprehension by Daniel Sockwell.
• No need to de-compose by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Learning about Raku by wsppan.
• Goodbye Raku by Phonetic Evolver.
• User defined ternaries by Ralph Mellor.
• Can not stick to Raku by LittleJack.

New Raku Modules

• Sparrow6::Rakudo::Install Sparrow6 plugin to install various versions of Rakudo by Alexey Melezhik.
• Text::CodeProcessing A package with functions for processing of code chunks in documents of different types (like Markdown, Org-mode, Pod6.) by Anton Antonov.
• Mac::Battery::Alerter Raku script to alert with speech in case of low battery on macOS by Mark Collins.

Updated Raku Modules

• Intl::LanguageTag by Matthew Stuckwisch.
• Universal::Errno by Travis Gibson.
• Sustenance by Andy Weidenbaum.
• Net::Ethereum by Konstantin Narkhov.
• p6doc by JJ Merelo.
• Sparrow6, Tomty by Alexey Melezhik.
• PDF::Class, PDF::Content, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Script::Hash, delete-old-until-size by Mark Collins.

Winding down

Wow. Cool conference developments, plenty of blog posts, the new-disp branch getting into testing phase, and some interesting new modules. An exciting week, hopefully of many more to come. Meanwhile, stay healthy and stay vigilant. The pandemic is most definitely not over yet!